“Accidents”

Lance Armstrong has said that, “if you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on.” But what happens when you have gotten on a bike… for 15 years and loved every minute of it—the physical activity, the camaraderie, the pure joy of experiencing new sights and sounds—and then you fall…and are seriously injured? What happens when that passion for cycling is eclipsed by fear? Fear for your own health and safety and fear of the possibility of putting your family through another touch-and-go trauma?

George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times' columnist in the state Capital generally writes about politics and policy in the Governor's office or the legislature.  However, in today's edition he changed courses and went on a full-throated attack against the idea that the people who cause car crashes should repay the city for the cost of sending emergency services to the crash scene.  The vitriol in this column is really something to behold, when you consider that all Sacramento is doing is making the people who cause car crashes pay for the city's response instead of forcing tax payers to pay for someone else's negligence.

Motor vehicle crashes caused 28 percent of all deaths among people 24 and under in the United States in 2006. In 2009, nearly 34,000 people died on America's roads, and that was considered a big improvement over previous years. More and more, it seems, Americans are wondering why our country is so far behind on creating safe transportation systems.

There's callous, there's heartless, and then there's this.

As I worked on the daily "Today's Headlines" roundup for this morning, there were three items I wanted to pull because they paint an ugly picture about what's going on in our streets.

In most of the United States, the general rule about harming people with automobiles goes like this: Stay at the scene, and if you're sober, you probably won't be looking at anything more substantial than a moving violation. Recent laws passed in Oregon, New York, and Delaware promise to hold motorists to a higher standard of care (if law enforcement employs the new tools), but one part of the country seems to be taking a step backward when it comes to condoning reckless driving.

Maybe the message that calling fatal crashes "accidents" that are  caused by negligence, distracted driving, DUI or some other form of negligence is finally catching on.

Via Biking In L.A. comes news that Angelina Everett, the driver who ran down city employee and community activist Ed Magos in January, has plead "no contest" to two misdemeanor charges for leaving the scene of a collision resulting in physical injuries and property damage.  While it's doubtful that Everett will face any jail time, after all she only crippled a person and left him lying in the street it's not like she meant to hurt him, this outcome is still much better than what was expected after the City Attorney and District Attorney took a pass on prosecuting Everett last winter.

It's been a common theme when Streetsblog covers crashes to note the soft bias of the writing and headlines in more traditional news sources.  This bias nearly always deflect guilt away from the people who cause the crashes. It amazes me when I watch coverage of a tragedy where change is demanded, say for example when a fifteen year old died of a drug overdose at a "rave", versus the ho-hum when there is a traffic crash.